1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of online collaboration and, more particularly, to managing multiple related discussion threads in an online collaboration environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's businesses often include personnel located in a variety of geographic areas. To manage these widespread resources, businesses employ many different types of communication tools. A popular type of communication tool is online collaboration. Online collaboration is a broad group of tools and/or environments that facilitate the ability for scattered personnel to work together on business projects. Video conferencing, Web meetings, and instant messaging systems are some example of online collaboration tools.
A problem encountered with many online collaboration tools is the inability to adequately segregate and manage the variety of discussion threads that can occur during the course of a collaboration session. For example, an online meeting discussing a planned software upgrade can include comments from participants that range from implementation and system concerns to budget and staffing issues. In this type of situation, the information pertaining to each different type of concern or issue becomes intermixed, which makes it difficult to ascertain key points and action items when the meeting concludes.
Meeting chairs often attempt to combat this type of conglomeration by creating a meeting agenda. Although an agenda is useful for organizing discussion threads, it does not have any impact on segregating discussion messages within the tool used for collaborating. For example, in an online meeting, the meeting agenda does not limit how the meeting participants post messages in a chat window; the software application used for conducting the online collaboration cannot force participants to post messages according to the agenda. Additionally, meeting agendas, while typically adequate for guiding interpersonal meetings, do not organize information in a fashion that facilitates structured archiving and/or structured searching of information. In an online collaboration, information archiving can be extremely important, especially since participants may desire to add and share information before and after a meeting with sets of meeting participants.
What is needed is a solution that manages multiple related discussion threads in online collaboration. That is, the solution would allow a collaboration session leader to define a topic model for the online collaboration that includes various related discussion threads. Ideally, such a solution could segregate the messages of the online collaboration by the discussion threads of the topic model within a user interface.